We car pool with another family on Fridays for Casa Vida. Last week their son was giving the boys an explanation of the beginnings of the world straight out of Genesis including Adam and Eve. This was on my mind anyway after reading the article about teaching evolution. We’ve always meant to give them a thorough understanding of the major world religions, it just doesn’t really come up in our house. They do know that different groups have different ideas about what happens after you die. Starting with their grandparent’s dog dying and someone telling them he was in heaven, we’ve had opportunities to discuss different beliefs: some people believe there is a heaven and hell, some nirvana, some reincarnation, some nothingness.
So realizing that we are defnintely falling behind (even if you don’t belong ot any religions, we both feel it’s important to know what people are talking about, understand stories that have made it into our culture, etc). I’ve been thinking I would start with creation stories from around the world. We’ve been talking about Native Americans lately and I thought that would be an easy place to do both. Tonight at dinner, just for fun, i decided to ask the kids how the thought the world started and how people got on it. Wow! D, who’s about to turn 8, rattled off that a comet or something hit the earth and that that broke off into being the moon a long time ago. He wasn’t quit sure how people began but thought it has something to do with apes. C, in all his delightful cheerfulness, claimed that a great baker had made us all out of rice krispey treats. D wanted to know how we didn’t know for sure yet. Daddy talked about the big bang theory.
From there we turned to pangea. I was planning on linking it to the big bang theory; that the planet itself has evolved and changed. Then using that to discuss how people got all over the world. As soon as I asked though, D said there used to be land bridges. Evidently we have been taking that kid to way too many museums and letting him watch too many science shows. He actually knew the word pangea and told use that the continents are still moving today at about an inch a year. We got out a globe to show them how narrow the Bering Straight is (and seeing the globe D asked why Hawaii, which is waaay over there, and Alaska, which doesn’t even touch, belong to us [one bought, one invaded]) and brought up pangea on the interenet. So native people crossed land bridges slowly over time, animals evolved independant of other regions (we used Australia as an example) and cultures slowly changed when they lost contact with each other. We finished it off by talking about what continent we live on, whether North and South America are one or two continents and why some cultures find it rude when people from the USA claim to be American.
Not bad for dinner conversation.
oh this is heaven!
Once again, I am amazed. I do know abut land bridges, migration etc. but I have to display my ignorance, for I am one of the many, I’m sure, who are totally unfamiliar with the term pangea. Before long my only area of intellectual superiority will be doing the NY Times Sunday crossword in ink; although, at the rate that C is mastering reading and spelling that too may be short lived.